Clone your drive

I’ve written previously about my backups strategy, but I’ve been lucky to not have any disasters – until recently. A failing internal drive in the iMac, then today sending my beloved MacBook in for keyboard repairs. I was saved by having clones of those machines (for the MacBook, “saved” by restoring a different MacBook to the same state, to use temporarily).

You may also want continuous remote backups. I use Backblaze, and keep my work files in Dropbox too. Perhaps consider Time Machine as a third level of safety, especially if you need old versions of files, but full restores from it are slower and less complete than from a clone.

If your machine is OK now and you lose data later, it’s your fault. Do your future self a favour, and back up.